Although the election of God is secret, it is made manifest by effectual calling.  Both election and effectual calling are founded on the free mercy of God Calling is proved to be according to the free grace of God by the declarations of Scripture, by the mode in which it is dispensed, by the instance of Abraham’s vocation, by the testimony of John, and by the example of all those who have been called.  There are two species of calling.  There is a universal call by which God, through the preaching of His Word, invites all men alike.  Besides this, there is a special call, which, for the most part, God bestows on believers only, when by the internal illumination of His Spirit he causes the Gospel to take deep root in their hearts.

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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

AIDS TO REFLECTION

This famous book, of which the full title is “Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion,” was published in 1825, nine years before the author’s death.  Its influence on thoughtful minds was very great, and many of the first divines of that period owed to it their profoundest religious ideas.  It has been said that the fame of Coleridge (see LIVES AND LETTERS) as a philosophic thinker is not so great as it was during the twenty years immediately after his death; but one imagines that this statement merely means that not so many people now read Coleridge as did fifty years ago.  The book, at any rate, has not yet been written which exposes a fallacy in his argument or demolishes his system.  It should be remembered that this poet and searching thinker, to whom men like Wordsworth and Haslitt listened with reverence, was for some time in his life a Unitarian, and won to faith in the divinity of Christ by the use of his reason.

I.—­INTRODUCTORY APHORISMS

It is the most useful prerogative of genius to rescue truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.  Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true that they lose the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul.

There is one sure way of giving freshness and importance to the most commonplace maxims—­that of reflecting on them in direct reference to our own state and conduct, to our own past and future being.  A reflecting mind, says an ancient writer, is the spring and source of every good thing.  As a man without forethought scarce deserves the name of man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

In order to learn, we must attend; in order to profit by what we have learnt, we must think; he only thinks who reflects.

To assign a feeling and a determination of their will as a satisfactory reason for embracing or rejecting an opinion is the habit of many educated people; to me, this seems little less irrational than to apply the nose to a picture, and to decide on its genuineness by the sense of smell.